Enlightenment Through Understanding

There is No Systemic ‘War on Blacks’ by Police

The evidence suggests blacks are responsible for most crime, which could explain why they are stopped and incarcerated at a higher rate than whites, as I explain in the post He Fit the Description:

It’s incontrovertible…the data shows that blacks commit most of the crimes. The left wants stops in proportion to the population, not the rate of crime. According to the left, since whites are 35% of the population, they should be 35% of the stops despite the fact they only commit 5% of all violent crimes. That sounds like bad policy.

1. Cops killed nearly twice as many whites as blacks in 2015. According to data compiled by The Washington Post, 50 percent of the victims of fatal police shootings were white, while 26 percent were black. The majority of these victims had a gun or “were armed or otherwise threatening the officer with potentially lethal force,” according to MacDonald in a speech at Hillsdale College.

Some may argue that these statistics are evidence of racist treatment toward blacks, since whites consist of 62 percent of the population and blacks make up 13 percent of the population. But as MacDonald writes in The Wall Street Journal, 2009 statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics reveal that blacks were charged with 62 percent of robberies, 57 percent of murders and 45 percent of assaults in the 75 biggest counties in the country, despite only comprising roughly 15 percent of the population in these counties.

If BLM really cared about saving lives, it would focus on black-on-black and black-on-white crimes, which claim far more lives than white-on-black crimes or police-on-black deaths. The problem is not the police or ‘institutional racism’; the problem is dysfunction within the black community. Vastly more blacks die at the hands of other blacks than the police:

Whites are slightly more likely to be killed during arrest than blacks:

Of course, when whites or Hispanics are killed by blacks or by the police, it gets far less media attention:

how, the shooting of an unarmed white man by police isn’t drawing any attention from the mainstream media.

Unlike the shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, which have created yet another firestorm complete with accusations of police racism, the media is ignoring the death of Dylan Noble, a 19-year-old white man, on June 25.

With white deaths, there are no cute pictures of the victim when he was a ‘youth’, no protests, and no statements by the president.

It doesn’t help the BLM cause that blacks are also more likely to open fire on police:

The police believed Alton Sterling posed a sufficient threat to their lives, as there is evidence he was armed and was reaching for his gun as he was being apprehended. More details on this will emerge as the investigation gets underway. Even if it was a wrongful death, that doesn’t change the fact that blacks are still far more likely to die at the hands of other blacks than the police or whites. Or that black deaths by other blacks receive far less media attention. The left is impervious to reason, logic, and empirical evidence.

Finally, black-on-white crime is substantially greater than the reverse. The table below shows murders by race of offender and victim in 2013. Note that overall, blacks kill as often as whites, although blacks represent only 13 percent of the population. Note also that black-on-white murder is more than double the rate of white-on-black murder (409 to 189). Similar results were found for 2012, 2011, 2010 and prior years.

Let’s look at the other side now. In 2013 alone, 49,851 officers were assaulted with firearms, knives and other weapons. Over the past 10 years, on average, 150 police officers have been killed in the line of duty every year. Fifty-seven of these were shot, stabbed, strangled or beaten. Of the 509 officers feloniously killed in the past 10 years, 46 percent of the perpetrators were black, despite their representing only 13 percent of the population. Do we call this a black war against the police?